Cities around the world join Earth Hour 2021 global cutoff against climate change

Famous buildings around the world, From the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House, they supported Earth Hour this Saturday, during which for 60 minutes they turned off their lights, symbolically, in a bid to fight climate change and biodiversity loss.

Earth Hour was born in 2007 in Sydney as a nod to sustainability and is today considered a classic in the calendar of environmentally relevant dates every last Saturday in March of the year.

“Earth Hour is a symbol with which we want to remind ourselves that nature is the survival system that provides us with everything we need, from the air we breathe to the water we drink and the food we eat and that we must defend it now to safeguard the health of our planet and, at the same time, our own health and well-being, ”they say of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), promoter of this symbolic global initiative .

This thirteenth edition has been added again Paris turn off the lighting of the Eiffel Tower, as he also did Sydney opera (Australia), while in Roma the facade of the Palazzo Senatorio del Campidoglio, seat of the city council of the Italian capital, has been left in the dark, as a “simple but significant gesture to remind us that the struggle to prevent the loss of biodiversity and the protection of nature are fundamental to the fight against climate change, ”said Mayor Virginia Raggi.

In Moscow The lights extinguished the Kremlin and the entire architectural complex that makes up Red Square: the historical museum, the luxurious GUM warehouses, Saint Basil’s Cathedral and Alexander Gardens, as well as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Tower of Ostánkino television and the seven skyscrapers erected in Stalin’s time.

Earth Hour has had very limited follow-up in Turkey due to restrictions derived from the pandemic and only two large companies with their own towers in Istanbul have announced they will turn off the lights, along with a chain of private schools and several municipal councils of provincial capitals, such as Gaziantep in the south-east of the country or Çanakkale in the Dardanelles, which have extinguished important urban centers or monuments.

In Spain The blackout was supported by major institutions, political parties, businesses, hotels, shopping centers and organizations of all kinds, which meanwhile left their headquarters and official bodies in obscurity in a call for solidarity for the protection of the environment and nature, to which emblematic monuments such as the Puerta de Alcalá in Madrid, the Alhambra in Granada or the Giralda in Seville have once again come together.

Por segundo año consecutivo las restricciones y confinamientos impuestos a consecuencia de la actual crisis sanitaria han hecho de la Hora del Planeta 2021, según sus organizadores, “el mayor evento digital en defensa del medio ambiente y una llamada a actuar por el clima y conectar con nature”.

For this reason, the programmed activities consisted of “a journey of sensations with proposals to be savored from home”, according to the website of the WWF, in which documentaries, recipes, illustrations or playlists of songs were published. , among other digital options. to the celebration.

For the organizers, Earth Hour “2021 is a decisive year for the protection of nature”, during which key political decisions will be taken at the 15th Biodiversity Summit in Kunming (China) or at the COP26 in Glasgow ( United Kingdom), “Two fundamental moments to arrive at an ambitious global plan to transform society’s relationship to biodiversity and ensure that, by 2050, the shared vision of living in harmony with nature is realized”.

From WWF, its secretary general in Spain, Juan Carlos del Olmo, assured Efe that “there is a very strong international movement of individuals, companies and organizations” ready to work together in the face of the consequences of the crisis. climate and assured that the participation of these entities in Earth Hour is “a way to reaffirm it”.

With information from EFE and photos from Reuters

Development…

KEEP READING: